starkhavened:

here’s the thing about manipulative people: they will continue to manipulate you long after you’ve cut them from your life.

they’ll manipulate your words, your actions, your personality when they retell the story to themselves, to mutual friends, to people you don’t even know. and they will retell it, because in the retelling, they get to be the victim, and they can use it to manipulate even more people into feeding the need for attention and sympathy that rules their lives.

it can be maddening after the fact, to think about the control they still hold over the narrative, but you have to remember that you are not that narrative. they manipulate what you left in your wake because they no longer have you to manipulate. and you’ve come out the winner either way, because all they have to cling to is that narrative and its details, but you? you’re free of them for good and you are so much better for it.